# Intelligently Cracking Passwords

From Ars:

One promising technique is to use programs such as the open-source Passpal to reduce cracking time by identifying patterns exhibited in a statistically significant percentage of intercepted passwords. For example, as noted above, many website users have a propensity to append years to proper names, words, or other strings of text that contain a single capital letter at the beginning. Using brute-force techniques to crack the password Julia1984 would require $6^{29}$ possible combinations, a “keyspace” that’s calculated by the number of possible letters (52) plus the number of numbers (10) and raising the sum to the power of nine (which in this example is the maximum number of password characters a cracker is targeting). Using an AMD Radeon HD7970, it would still take about 19 days to cycle through all the possibilities.

Using features built into password-cracking apps such as Hashcat and Extreme GPU Bruteforcer, the same password can be recovered in about 90 seconds by performing what’s known as a mask attack. It works by intelligently reducing the keyspace to only those guesses likely to match a given pattern. Rather than trying aaaaa0000, ZZZZZ9999, and every possible combination in between, it tries a lower- or upper-case letter only for the first character, and tries only lower-case characters for the next four characters. It then appends all possible four-digit numbers to the end. The result is a drastically reduced keyspace of about 237.6 billion, or 52 * 26 * 26 * 26 * 26 * 10 * 10 * 10 * 10.

Pretty great counting principle stuff right?